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Linux Management Remains Overlooked by Wintel Trade Press

the Wintel trade press is waiting to get their slice of the desktop Linux vendors' marketing dollars before they'll connect the dots and recognize the value of thin clients.

InfoWorld believes “Linux
[is] nearly ripe for the enterprise desktop” but “for now,
administrators are applying mass changes to deployed desktops via
home-brew methods”, so it’s not really ready yet. They seem quite
insistent on this; “
Manageability is a must for Linux to succeed on the enterprise
desktop”, they say, making “obvious comparisons to Microsoft
Windows -- including Active Directory, Group Policy objects, and
Microsoft Exchange”. Oh dear. These sorts of comments make
experienced Linux/Un*x folk smile sadly and turn back to their screen,
happy to be as far away from Microsoft’s products as possible.

Why? Because these “obvious” things exist to solve problems Linux
does not have. Perhaps the exception is Microsoft Exchange, which as
far as I can tell has nothing to do with “management” but rather has
to do with allowing people to share calendars with people who use
Microsoft Outlook, something that Linux does just fine now that
Novell (aka Suse) has released Connector
for Exchange under the GPL. It’s already available to Red Hat
users via download, and will be a fully
supported part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the end of August.
No doubt other Linux vendors have similar plans; should they not act
quickly enough your local Linux support company is always ready to
help. I’m sure they’d be even more ready to support a shared
calendaring and email solution that’s not Microsoft based, but we’re
getting far afield here.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that Linux/Un*x does not suffer
from the very same problems addressed by a plethora of Microsoft’s
products and features; rather it’s that the Un*x world solved these
problems years ago. Back in 1987, 5 years before the MS Windows
3.1 (the first usable version), the most recent version of X Windows was
released. X Windows means X
Terminals, the original thin
client. InfoWorld recognizes that Suse supports this type of
“thin-client [sic] installation, which is intended for a minimal
installation on slower hardware to be used as a terminal services
client.” Yup, not only do you not have to buy all new hardware to
deploy new desktops you don’t even have to deploy new software to
desktops because all the users are running their software on a single
central server, or better yet cluster of servers so when a server dies
the users just login again and continue where they left off. Of
course when a thin client dies the worker can just move to the next
desk until a replacement arrives. Centralized desktop management,
enterprise desktop backup, distribution of application updates,
redundant system fail over, the regular rip and replace hardware
upgrade cycle, even network wide user authentication, many problems
vanish when you abandon the Wintel approach.

The obvious question is: “If thin clients are so easy to
manage why isn’t everybody doing it?” Wintel users
don’t do it because Microsoft licenses their software in a
manner that makes it too expensive; apparently the Wintel vendors find
they make more money if software must be deployed to high-powered
single-user “desktop computers”, the same computers many
now use as Linux servers. The traditional Un*x vendors couldn’t
do it because, as they say, “they don’t have the
applications”. But Linux does, and people find Linux
thin client savings exceeded 37% in just 8 months.

With ongoing operational
savings like this companies are treating Linux thin client deployments
as a strategic asset and keeping quiet about them, or they should.

Being part of the Un*x world since 1987, there are manyways to
setup Linux thin clients. The traditional Thin Client:
New User Guide weighs in at 8 pages. As with any mature tool,
organization’s are best advised to tailor their use of thin clients to
suit their individual needs; no need to shoe-horn in a
one-size-fits-all solution when many choices are available, and
supported, out of the box. Powerful “home-brew” indeed. Still, some
methods are more popular than others. The Linux Terminal Server Project has been
working since 1996 developing and documenting the deployment of Linux
based thin client solutions, and Novell is basing their next
Suse Linux desktop on it.

Oddly enough, InfoWorld is sure that “Sun Microsystems has
the right idea with the Sun
Java Desktop System Configuration Manager” (link not in
original), the tool used to manage Sun’s Linux thin client
desktop. Perhaps they’re thinking that a powerful management
tool can only be used by the IT administrator population if it’s
got one massive GUI
and a name with some marketing muscle behind it. I’d thought
that by now everyone had
long
acknowledged that Linux comes with good GUI configuration tools,
all you need when your desktops are all on a single central server,
but if you feel the need for a all-in-one program you can always use
Webmin. In the end, could it be
that “Management continues to be Linux’s greatest
weakness” because the pundits have been right all along when
they’ve said that Linux requires a
better class of administrator, one that can see things the pundits
cannot? Nah. I think it’s the same reason you so rarely see a
review of Free Software, or any other software that’s not got
marketing dollars behind it; the Wintel trade press is waiting to get
their slice of the desktop Linux vendors’ marketing dollars
before they’ll connect the dots and recognize the value of thin
clients.

After all we are talking about the Wintel trade press. You
don’t piss in your own pool.